Mick LaSalle

Techine doesn't have much of a story to tell, so instead of moving the narrative forward, he expands it laterally.

The last five minutes of Midnight Sky are touching and beautifully acted — if you’re willing to wait for it.

It's a film with impressive elements, though taken as a whole it's pop entertainment that doesn't fully deliver on the entertainment end.

The story is fluff, but it's mostly appealing.

Yet here's what's strange: As awful as To Rome With Love is - and the awfulness is unmistakable - it is, as an experience, not unpleasant. You will probably see several better movies this year that you will enjoy less. It's a mess, but it's Rome. It's a mess, but it's Woody Allen.

Dull but sweet.

The result is mixed bag, an intermittently pleasing but mostly routine effort.

Doesn't hit its stride until the last 30 minutes, and by then, it's just a little too late.

By the end, everything that was initially serious about the film becomes silly and everything appealing about it turns sour.

The mixed report on La Mission is that writer-director Peter Bratt doesn't really know how to make pictures, but he does know the central character in his movie.

A light film, airy, likable and set in Venice.

Taken as a motion picture, the new "Harry" comes up short. But taken as a visual aid to the experience of reading a book, the new "Harry" does its job.

Ronin eventually becomes tiresome, but the pairing of De Niro and Reno never gets old.

A movie whose main virtue was its honesty ultimately lands in a place that feels canned and unsatisfying. But on the way there, Backwards isn't so bad.

In every small way Heston succeeds, but Needful Things ultimately is hard to sit through. It should have been edited with a meat ax. [27 Aug 1993, p.C4]

The script is hopeless in both senses of the word, offering no hope and lacking in quality. But I enjoyed the two victims, at least until they started screaming, and appreciate the way director Renny Harlin creates a sense of menace by his choice of lenses and his placement of the camera.

The only problem with this movie, a substantial one, is that there’s a major sag in the story about halfway through. For its first hour, Moonfall is a blast.

It's a movie, a goofy little movie. Not so bad, but as far as food and sensuality go, ``Like Water for Chocolate'' still has the edge.

The movie's one flaw is this: The whole movie hangs on the gradual unraveling of the central mystery and is made with the expectation that the audience is fascinated and hanging on every tidbit.

A fascinating look at a bizarre man and a brilliant talent. But a good deal of the movie is described by its subtitle -- "A Son's Journey'' -- and to the extent it is, the movie sags.

The film is always a little bit at a distance, almost involving, always good enough to make us root for it, but rarely better than average.

The results are predictable and only mildly entertaining.

Let It Ride has atmosphere, plus a good setting, appealing actors - and a bad script. [19 Aug 1989]

In its own ridiculous way, The Butterfly Effect is an entertaining movie, despite mediocre acting, lackluster direction and a story that's sometimes frustrating. It has the integrity of camp, maintaining an odd earnestness in the face of its own absurdity.

The three films are watchable but resolutely minor works, though each has something to recommend it.

A goopy Gwyneth Paltrow movie.

Its take on the political scene is unsophisticated, and its humor heavy- handed. Like any satire, it exaggerates, but it exaggerates the wrong things. [11 Sep 1992, p.C1]

One of these days, Angelina Jolie might very well direct a great movie. She has a rare talent and intense concerns and interests. But first she is going to have to suppress some self-defeating impulses that have now twice taken potentially effective films and rendered them ridiculous.

As a screenwriter, Lemmons is able to keep all the plot elements in place. But as a director, she is unable to keep things moving.

An ambitious political thriller, a multilingual film of mood and texture and the occasional haunting image.

As the record of a cultural event, Soul Power is a hit-and-miss affair.

Gets most of the big things wrong and almost all the little things right. For two-thirds of its running time, it's a nasty little delight with an amusing and curmudgeonly central character.

The chief asset of Ain't Them Bodies Saints is Rooney Mara, who gets more interesting with every movie.

So the bottom line: This is an undeniably effective movie that I mostly enjoyed, even though I’m not altogether sure it should ever have been made.

The story is unbelievable and phenomenally silly, not a good combination.

Particularly impressive is the film's success at making an actor of average weight look emaciated. His cheekbones are built up so his cheeks appear to sink.

The pleasures are intermittent but can be located: Jennifer Coolidge, as Jane's travel companion, is funny even when the script isn't, and Feild is a nice stand-in for Colin Firth in the Austen hero department.

To my eyes, the whole thing looks sad, like something people might cling to in the absence of religion - or a kind of religion in itself, minus dogma or salvation, but with lots of people standing around dressed like total goofballs.

Destroyer makes “Manchester By the Sea” seem like an afternoon party with clowns and balloon animals. But if there’s a reason to see Destroyer, it’s for Kidman’s performance. It’s to take that journey with her.

The result is Allen's weakest film in years.

As for Beowulf itself, it's all about the visuals, which means that as soon as the novelty of 3-D wears off, the experience has been had.

When it's not awful, it's dull.

It's 90 minutes of flying, dismembered limbs and explosions of blood, but give the man credit. Stallone can do action. If you want action and nothing but, here it is.

Most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment. Guy Pearce has a lot to do with that, as the most impervious action star imaginable.

If ultimately Slow West seems more like a filmmaking exercise than an engaging piece of work — despite Fassbender’s star presence — that’s all right. Filmmakers need to get their exercise. Let’s see what Maclean does next.

Mars Needs Moms floats about 45 minutes' worth of story in an 88-minute ocean.

A documentary in search of a story.

Anyone who appreciates Sylvester Stallone or enjoys the "Rocky" movies will find moments to enjoy in Rocky Balboa and will leave the theater reasonably satisfied. It's just good to see the guy, and it's good to revisit the character. And that's everything good to be said for the experience.

The resulting film has the integrity and the ugliness of the truth. It's not true because it's ugly; no, it's ugly because it's true.

Freejack is the kind of picture that you watch and scoff at, and then when it's over, you leave the theater having had a good time, only mildly aware that the good time had something to do with the quality of the movie. Freejack is convoluted, a meeting of bad writing and bad science fiction. And yet, taken as a whole, it's really not bad. [18 Jan 1982, p.C3]

To mildly respect Japanese Story is easy. To enjoy it would require an act of will.

A great movie was within reach with Judy — the new Judy Garland biopic starring Renee Zellweger — but the producers and creators made an epic mistake: They didn’t use Garland’s actual vocals. Instead, they let Zellweger pinch-hit for Babe Ruth and ended up spoiling the movie.

Roger Michell directs it as though it were an uproarious comedy, but the laughs are light, and the story's real appeal lies in its behind-the-scenes look at the manners and politics of morning television.

The smarter way to make this movie would have been to edit out everything extraneous to the story of Xavier and Wendy. They're the soul and heart of the movie, while everything else is pretty much dead weight.

Though it ultimately recovers, too much of The Good Thief forgets about Bob, and in the process the movie loses much of its allure and vividness.

The film is mildly diverting, occasionally engaging, certifiably workmanlike and altogether too flat an experience to inspire any strong feelings, positive or negative. It’s just there. Some people watch movies for the same reason others climb mountains, because they are there. Well, this is a movie for that audience.

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on - not generally, but specifically - you'll be doing better than most.

In the end, it's really just a thriller, slower than most, with pockets of dead time but with a few extra flourishes, too, thanks to Norton.

An intelligent literary mystery story that holds interest and is intermittently affecting, but it never soars.

The strange thing is that for all of Fonda's whining, Pullman's wary squinting and muttering, the bad dialogue, the cheesy effects, the severed toes, the severed heads, the severed bodies and the cliched directorial choices, Lake Placid adds up to a halfway enjoyable time at the movies.

It's the typical elements that make Eraser no more than a solid bit of fluff: This is one of those movies where good guys don't miss, and bad guys can't shoot to save their lives.

Over the last few years, the Avengers, together and separately, have spawned a number of good, very good, or reasonably entertaining movies. But with Avengers: Infinity War, the Marvel Comics franchise arrives at the stage of decadence. There’s just too much of it. A victim of its own success, there are just too many appealing characters here to stuff into one story.

The Seagull has all the big things going for it and yet so many little things going against it that it’s just not the movie it might have been.

A cut above most pictures of its type.

The only thing wrong with “Shotgun Wedding” is that it isn’t any good. Aside from that, it’s a pleasant experience.

This is the world of Maze Runner: The Death Cure, the third installment in the “Maze Runner” trilogy, a kind of destitute man’s impoverished cousin’s answer to the “Divergent” series.

As light entertainment goes, CHiPs is fairly accomplished, and Pena and Shepard make a good team. If someone wants to turn CHiPs into a franchise of some kind, worse things have happened.

There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.

Graffiti Bridge is a bad excuse for a movie but a very good excuse for a rock concert. [03 Nov 1990, p.C3]

A lively and amiably stupid action movie, given an extra dose of atmosphere by the presence of Vin Diesel. He is his own quality control, his own authentic center, so that even in a story like this — a kind of Philip K. Dick for dummies — there’s something onscreen that’s not ridiculous, that’s reliable and consistently cool.

Guy Ritchie is the worst screenwriter in the world, but, to be fair, he is not the worst director. He is only the worst director of the people who actually get to make movies.

As Enzo Ferrari, Driver looks stylish and commanding, but the movie doesn’t figure out how to make him into an interesting man.

There is a kind of historical British movie — Tolkien is one of them — that almost feels as if the subject were incidental.

What pushes it above mediocrity is that it ends better than it begins.

A cute and amusing little romance that has all the fiery impetuosity of an egg sandwich.

The Plot Against Harry isn't stark and merciless enough to be a black comedy or zany enough to be just plain fun. After a while the oddball characters and unlikely twists of the plot lose their charm, and the movie just seems self-conscious and cute. [07 Feb 1990, p.E1]

Aside from the defection scene, the only tension in The White Crow concerns whether Nureyev will achieve the renown he deserves or whether his career will be killed in the crib. That’s not nothing, but it’s small stuff to peg a two-hour movie on, especially one with an unsympathetic protagonist.

When compared with the ambition and achievement of recent animated films, such as "Coraline" and "Toy Story 3," Despicable Me hardly seems to have been worth making, and it's barely worth watching.

Amusing and holds interest largely thanks to its re-creation of a glitzy, flamboyant era, not to mention its soundtrack of disco songs that sound a lot better today than 20 years ago.

Never dull, but it's rarely more than gently entertaining.

In his performance, Jeremy Renner hints at something dark stirring beneath Webb’s surface, but it never quite comes out, and we’re left with something more on the order of a rough-hewn saint. Kill the Messenger tells an interesting tale, but it’s caught in an odd zone between too-Hollywood and not Hollywood enough.

The movie's effectiveness is distorted by its hero-worship of the Chicago defendants.

The slow pace kills the sense of urgency, and the length and breadth of the film makes the story seem insignificant. Tarantino is still someone to watch, but Jackie Brown, before it's over, becomes a who-cares proposition.

Precious and uninsightful but ends beautifully.

Hall Pass attempts to take the Farrellys' harsh humor and bring it into harmony with what has become the modern comic style, which is to be coarse but not absurd, to be brutally honest but real.

Missing a purpose.

It's an intelligent movie about economics. As such, it would probably make more sense to have it reviewed by economists than film critics.

The story here isn't much, and the truth it reveals, to them and us, isn't earthshaking, just quiet and somber.

Puccini for Beginners is literate and sensitive, characterized by witty dialogue and smart, emotional two-person encounters.

You’d have to be passionately interested in the details of an Irish small town not to find “Small Things Like These” something of a slog.

For all Wong's energy and virtuosity, the relentless stylishness and whimsicality of Chungking Express become irritating. The cast is appealing -- particularly the forlorn young cops. But the velocity of Wong's attack seems out of proportion to the airy, lightweight quality of the stories.

Excess Baggage falls down as a showcase for Silverstone, who made a big splash in "Clueless" and whose production company is releasing this film. She comes across as unappealing and unseasoned in ways that go beyond the role.

It tries to get by on charm, and like a lot of movies, and people who make that attempt, “Kingsman” does have charm — just not enough.

No campy vampire movie, and the early part of the film is well-made enough that the sadness of Vlad’s dilemma is truly felt.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

Might have been more effective as a documentary.

Though “Society of the Snow” has its moments, it’s difficult to see what was gained by telling the story as a dramatic feature. Yes, in a documentary we’d lose the amazing crash scene, but the story would otherwise be better served by a straight laying out of the facts.

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film.

Sixty-seven minutes in, I looked up and noticed the movie had 53 minutes left to go, even though every plot element had been resolved. And that's precisely where the movie went to hell. [23 Nov 2014, p.M21]

Until it becomes completely demented, The Guest is a perfectly respectable thriller, and even when it stops being respectable — even when it goes off the rails and becomes ridiculous — it’s still entertaining.

Alas, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.

This is just a slightly better than mediocre film with a disconcerting grasp of the truth.

From scene to scene, the tone shifts from supposed sincerity to arch and amused, until the picture begins to seem like some mad, desperate, scattershot attempt to hold an audience's attention from moment to moment, by any means.

That the movie is leisurely and unconventional is all part of its charm, too - until it isn't anymore. The movie is a tale of corruption, but then it's not. It's a love story, but no, not quite. Later, it flirts with becoming a great journalism tale, or at least a whimsical journalism tale, but that vein leads nowhere, too. Nor is it much of anything else.

Bleak.

The saving grace of Old School is that it has about a dozen funny moments. These moments aren't mildly funny or chuckle funny but really funny.

The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether it’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” or “Ratcatcher” — slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

If the writing and direction carry Sphere most of the way, the actors manage to bring it home.

At times, the sight of reserved English actors slapping, hugging and acting all Russian looks bizarre, though one casting choice is prime: Bob Hoskins has the ideal air of impish menace in the featured role of Khrushchev.

Never dull and never loses its audience, but there is, inevitably, a certain sameness to the scenes, with Garfield spending a lot of time just sitting there with a goofy smile on his face.

A creditable genre entry, the rare action movie with a discernible story, an assured pace and a charismatic central character. It falls apart in the end.

Painless and predictable, with an amusing if overwrought featured performance by Woody Harrelson.

It's marred by loaded language and a propagandistic tone that undercuts rather than promotes its purposes.

The last 15 minutes of “Twisters” are so much fun that they might easily convince viewers that they’ve seen a good movie. So this leaves you with a choice: Is it worth suffering through a boring hour and a so-so half hour, just to see an entertaining opening and a genuinely exciting finish? I know what I’d say (nope), but this is one you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Take Shelter has a problem, the simplest of all problems but no less serious for its being simple. It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.

More hokey than heartfelt.

The performances are heavy-handed, except for that of Jon Hamm, who benefits not only from playing something of a wise guy (a sports memorabilia salesman), but also from his own unsentimental instincts.

It’s a nice movie, and perfectly watchable — yet it’s hard to escape the sense that it should have been more.

The best aspect of “A Hero,” and probably the aspect which Farhadi would most like us to contemplate, is the internal journey of Rahim, who, over the course of his difficulties, slowly and belatedly seems to come into his manhood.

As a comedy, Junior has its share of laughs -- but no more than its share.

A premise so rock-solid, so guaranteed to please, that it almost doesn't matter that the movie is otherwise a routine slasher, and not a particularly scary one.

The movie lacks joy. It has poignancy and intelligence, and it holds interest, but it never opens up into happiness and fantasy. Maybe it's the recession.

Hill and his cast, including Christopher Walken as a sadistic hood, struggle to score a victory of style over substance. But substance, or a lack thereof, wins.

Not a campy film, but it revels in extremes, and has the same sort of appeal.

Another urban action thriller that's better than some, worse than most and so forgettable that it's possible to forget it while watching it?

Some so-so movies are just easy to be around, and this is one of them.

Imagine watching Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," except without good scenes, without a marriage (legal or spiritual) and without people worthy of anybody's attention, even each other's. Now imagine something even worse.

It’s as if no aspect of Perfect Find were thought through because everyone expected that, whatever happened, Gabrielle Union could be counted on to carry the movie. She almost does, but doesn’t.

Yet with all its virtues, Thunderheart unravels after the first hour and continues unraveling until it chokes itself. The movie's complicated story, involving the FBI, the government, and the feuding tribal factions, is impossible to sort through. [3 Apr 1992, p.D1]

Director Mike Figgis (''Internal Affairs'') adorns ''Mr. Jones'' with some unconventional touches, abrupt fade-outs that give a touch of poetry to the endings of scenes -- and keeps the audience believing that ''Mr. Jones'' is a class act long after it's obvious it's not. [8 Oct 1993, p.C3]

Competent but uninspired thriller.

It's an ambitious film -- but also a scattered, unfocused one.

The new movie lacks something, a special something. It's a quality that has characterized some of the best of the first 19 Bond movies: extravagant ludicrousness.

Maybe this mixed-up and weird, awful but awfully likable movie is what Dirty Harry had coming to him, after all.

Look Both Ways has a couple of things going for it, namely a compelling premise and the charm of Lili Reinhart (“Riverdale”) in the lead role. But the whole movie is a lie, and once you figure that out, the realization cuts into a lot of the pleasure.

A fairly mediocre film, not nearly as funny as it should be, nor as heartfelt. On the plus side, it's only 85 minutes long and isn't boring. On the downside, it has an intrusive pop soundtrack and a screenplay full of fake conflicts.

The upshot is a film that is stunning to look at, even inspiring at times, but dramatically bizarre. Obviously, this technology has its place, but it makes too strong a statement to be casually used in remakes.

The last hour of Titanic is huge and staggering, but there's no horror in it. No gravity, either. Entrusted with one of the century's monumental stories, Cameron can present it only as a crying shame. And that's a crying shame.

All Upside Down has is its love story, which despite the undeniable appeal of Sturgess and Dunst, never ignites. So the movie is like a huge package, wrapped in gold leaf, but containing a 10-dollar toaster. Fine. It's a toaster. It works. It's not garbage. But who can pretend it's not a disappointment?

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

Has some funny moments, and if you're a Beavis and Butt-head fan, you'll enjoy the movie.

Burns has a hard time finding a central idea, some overall point that isn't borrowed or trite. Or both.

Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much where action movies are these days - a combination of comedy without wit, action without drama and elaborate visuals that are nothing much to look at.

The actors do their best, particularly the impeccable Mirren, but Schepisi draws a shroud of chaste dullness over their scenes and lays on an energy- sapping score.

A so-so, OK, perfectably acceptable, nice, rather charming romantic comedy with two stars who are entirely watchable.

The inescapable, undeniable weakness of Father Mother Sister Brother is that, while its first part is thoroughly satisfying, its second part is just OK, and its third part is close to a waste of time.

If this movie were a human being, it would be intelligent and sincere but so depressed as to be unable to get out of bed without a forklift.

It's about what you'd expect _ a collection of gags, some good, some bad, with the bare suggestion of a story to hang it all on. Chevy Chase, as usual, is a lot better than he has to be and lifts the picture to the point that it's intermittently fun and fairly painless. [1 Dec 1989, p.E1]

In the end the most interesting thing about In the Mouth of Madness is its weird relationship with itself -- its cheesy horror celebrating the power of cheesy horror, while pretending to be appalled.

Even without surprises, or drama, or clever dialogue, or even a single scene of any merit, Rebound goes along pleasantly.

An appealing film with a hideous title.

The world of The Black Dahlia is beyond bleak, beyond film noir.

The movie starts to fray once we realize that DuVernay is not going to make a case for Wilkerson’s ideas. Rather, she plans to serve them up as undeniable truths.

It’s a line that all horror movies must walk. The characters must be stupid enough to get themselves into trouble, but not so stupid that we don’t start thinking of them in Darwinian terms. Somehow, “Cuckoo” stays on the right side of that line, but barely.

There's not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that's worth watching from beginning to end.

They don't get more frustrating than American Rhapsody, a near-great film for about an hour that changes into a self-indulgent mess.

Skids into absurdity, but it never quite gets boring. Movies like this rarely are.

Two things hold back Don't Stop Believin' as a documentary. The first is that it presents the world of Journey and the people in it through such a lens of love and light that it begins to seem like a publicity film...The second flaw is that it leaves out vital information. It doesn't, for example, answer the big question, "What happened to Steve?"

The movie has that fatal triptych that is becoming Reiner's romantic-comedy signature: drippy sentiment, zany scenes that trivialize the characters and a horror of adventure.

Taps into a fear hitherto unexplored by cinema: fear of Bill Gates.

Though Carolla and co-filmmaker Kevin Hench devise some funny situations — particularly, the one in which a newly divorced woman insists on coming back to his room — the overall feeling that comes across is one of sadness, and that seems intentional.

The biggest sequel of the summer has more dinosaurs, better special effects and more action than the original... But the inspiration is gone, and with it most of the fun.

The story may be scattered and sagging and the picture may have little emotional impact -- certainly nothing to justify the epic running time -- but Garcia at least succeeds in making Havana in the 1950s seem like a vibrant, special place. He doesn't exactly make the audience care, but he does make the audience understand why he cares, and that's something.

It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous.

Instead we get Knightley, who juts her chin, quakes, shakes and bugs her eyes, but nothing about her pain calls out to us, because nothing in it seems real.

Jindabyne suffers from too many extraneous elements and from a story that doesn't land with enough force or purpose.

As a cold meditation on sex and power, The Lover succeeds. The girl remains invincible behind her youth and vapidity, calmly amazed at her own strength. But as an evocation of the mysterious and universal currents of love and time and passion, ''The Lover'' is inflated but empty. [13 Nov 1992, p.C3]

An odd little concoction, a coming-of-age story that, only in passing, is also a mystery.

The experience of watching Foxcatcher is of constantly waiting for something to happen — and of giving up, long before something actually does.

A movie with an irresistible premise that ultimately collapses around the whole issue of motivation. Until it does, this is a thoroughly entertaining picture.

As a viewing experience, the film is by turns heartrending and stultifying, but mostly stultifying.

From a narrative feature, we want drama and illumination, the truths that go beyond the plain facts. That’s where Mary Shelley comes up a bit short. It’s never less than competent and intelligent, and here and there it’s better than that.

It's middling Allen, which means that fans won't be sorry to see it, while everyone else can wait until the next "Bullets Over Broadway."

The film's real find is D.J. Qualls, who is very funny as a jug-eared nerd who blossoms into a wild man after three days on the road.

Sanctum is by no means a badly made movie, but it has the feel of one of those dramatic re-enactments made exclusively for Imax theaters.

Somebody I Used to Know comes dangerously close to being interesting. It’s a romantic comedy, but it’s almost a twisted drama about a seriously damaged creep who goes back to her hometown and starts wrecking people’s lives.

The film is mired in gloom, not just sadness, but heaviness.

Emotionally false.

Falls victim to a fatal lack of narrative drive, suspense and drama. Kidman and Hopkins are wrong for their roles, and that, combined with a pervading inevitability, cuts the film off from any sustained vitality. The result is something admirable but lifeless.

An interesting movie that doesn’t completely satisfy, but its central character lingers in the mind.

For whatever faults she had as a candidate, Chisholm earned her paragraph in the annals of our democracy, and “Shirley” does a conscientious job of fleshing out her story.

A smirky cleverness infects much of the picture, yet some scenes are so skillfully created that it's hard not to admire them, and Dominique Pinon's sensitive performance as a retired circus man gives the movie a soul. [10 Apr 1992]

Awake fails only in the sense that it’s a movie in one note, and thus its story only knows one direction, which is downhill.

The movie is ridiculous.

Insurgent would be a much worse movie if the good parts were all at the beginning. But they are saved for the end, and they leave the viewer with a feeling of, “Well, that was OK,” even though most of it wasn’t.

It's not bad. It's cute.

Succeeds in its modest way because its stars, Melissa Joan Hart and Adrian Grenier, are pleasant to be around.

So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.

Without the sheer watchability of Johnson, Reynolds and Gadot, Red Notice would have been intolerable. It also would have been pointless. But with them, it’s a pleasantly lousy movie that some people, if they look at the screen and squint really hard, might mistake for something decent.

Josh Brolin plays the leader of the gangster squad as a kind of dedicated dunce, which is appropriate considering their clumsy antics. Ryan Gosling has more nuance as his right-hand man, but Emma Stone is completely out of her element as a slinky film noir heroine, a walking anachronism.

Those Who Wish Me Dead pretty much works on the gut-level way it was intended, but it gets extra credit for being unintentionally funny.

Two good characters and two good performances go into the old poubelle — or, as we say in English, the garbage bin.

Despite moments of unintentional humor, “The Ritual” has an appealing gravity about it, which probably derives from its adherence to the historical record.

There's a good idea behind Repo Men, not a whole lot of thinking, but at least one whole idea.

At first, The Oath looks as though it will be a study of the soul-corroding effects of twisted ideology, but it emerges as the reverse.

Genre movies like “The Fabulous Four” can only be so good, but it’s pleasing enough to do its job.

The comedy is hit and miss, with good bits interrupted by dead patches. It's a movie to root for more than to enjoy.

Yet all this work, all this skill, serve as little more than an elaborate setting for a rhinestone. At its core there is no passion, no sincerity of conception, nothing that might have made The Quick and the Dead into anything more than moment-to-moment stimulation. You get lots of clothes here, but no emperor. Or rather, no empress.

For all its faults, some of the action scenes in The Rookie are spectacular. [07 Dec 1990, p.E1]

More emphasis on these darker, subterranean elements might have made for a fuller experience, but Infinitely Polar Bear is really all about a father as seen from a child’s perspective. It’s better than a scrapbook item, as in a film made to be appreciated by one family. But it’s not quite a successful movie.

The result is a film that will probably please people already fascinated by Behan but leave everyone else yawning with admiration.

Director Doug Hamilton was given extraordinary access from the very beginning, so that we see Green Day composer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong having some of his initial meetings with Broadway director Michael Mayer, who conceived the show.

The movie's pleasures are acting pleasures, but the movie doesn't compel attention and never seems like more than the frame for a performance.

The film never settles into an assured rhythm, and instead the actors always seem to be pushing, putting the hard sell on an audience that, however distracted by the strenuousness of the sales pitch, still isn't buying.

Though it's only 72 minutes, by the time it's over, you'll be ready for it to end. Still, as a glimpse of the Arab world right before the Arab Spring, this documentary may be of some lasting interest.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the most important thing, the one thing it absolutely had to do. It ends well.

Sober and dispiriting, tense and morose.

The movie's strength is that it makes us want to know more about Levitch, and we pay attention as the tidbits are dropped -- that he's from a middle-class Jewish family in upstate New York, and that he did time in prison. The movie's flaw is that, having gained our attention, it fails to tell us what we want to know.

A caper comedy with some definite problems.

Baywatch should have been a lot more fun.

Tender Bar is a lovely movie — so long as it stays within a half mile radius of the bar. When it drifts from the bar, it collapses. When it goes back to the bar, it lifts a little. But it stays away too often to be called a success.

The saddest thing about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is that it’s not bad, but typical, that this emptiness — this immersion in mass numbification — is the modern style.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

A self-conscious attempt at the brass ring.

Monotonous.

Holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.

It’s original and idiosyncratic, but Swicord lets herself get away with things another director might not have allowed.

Something to Talk About never goes bad, though it does get corny in places, and it hits a couple of dull patches near the finish. The last half-hour contains two completely different scenes involving two completely different horseback riding contests. Yet despite the braying insistence of the sound track, the audience doesn't care about either one.

If there’s one thing interesting about “Spaceman,” it’s how it demonstrates how a great actress’ essence — just the essence, not even the performance — can elevate a nothing part.

Unfortunately Young Guns II is a small blaze and no glory. [01 Aug 1990, p.E1]

Passenger 57 is silly but fun -- an action movie accidentally saved by its glorious stupidity. It will make people shake their heads, roll their eyes and laugh at the screen, but it will keep their attention, because the movie has a crazy kind of life. [06 Nov 1992, p.C1]

The only problem with The Better Angels is that it’s not nimble enough to vary its strategy or to find ways for the character of young Abe (Braydon Denney) to grow over the course of the movie.

Aside from the disgusting parts, Spiral is a fairly decent thriller.

In the end, Crash lacks a cumulative impact. It takes audiences to new places, but we've all been to similar places, and we walk out knowing no more than we did walking in.

Has a certain B-movie integrity -- a muscular commitment to grabbing the viewer's eye and keeping things moving. It won't win any awards, but it holds interest.

For all this, there is one unalloyed good thing to be said for High Tension. When all is said and done, it really does live up to its title. In every other way it's trash, but that truth-in-advertising aspect is a major weight to throw into the mix.

The movie doesn't have three brain cells to rub together, but the premise carries it a long way.

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

The real problem with True Story is contained in its title. The story isn’t too good to be true, but rather too true to be good.

Alas, the main thing that comes through in Heaven Knows What is that a junkie’s life is really, really monotonous.

Leaves an impression, while its specifics fade almost immediately.

Either a go-for-broke action movie or a sick, sick movie for a sick, sick public.

There are a lot of little things wrong with Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but one big thing right: Cate Blanchett. She takes the title role and has a party with it. The little things wrong can’t be summed up in a sentence, but they linger in the mind and intrude on the memory of the movie, once the bedazzlement of Blanchett’s performance starts to wear off.

With a novel idea at its center and some good jokes scattered throughout, Pixels is a relief from the self-serious action films that invade movie theaters at this time of year. For most of the way, it’s good enough to enjoy, and for the rest of the way, it’s good enough to root for. But ultimately, it’s not quite good enough ... to be good enough.

There should be a special category for movies, like “Dog,” that are hard to enjoy but easy to take. They’re not entertainment. They’re more like a vague form of companionship. They aspire to little but demand nothing, and, if you like, they can keep you company. You can’t call that a good movie, but you’d have to be a creep to call it a bad movie.

Downhill is not a funny movie and wasn’t intended to be. It has moments of humor, but of the more uncomfortable variety, not the kind that provoke laughter, but cringing.

The movie consistently delivers in lots of little ways, but in a big way only once, in a spectacular sequence that begins with a series of earthquakes and culminates in an airline catastrophe.

Life of the Party presents a situation more than a story, and in that it’s more like a sitcom than a conventional movie.

It’s a sweet movie that accidentally expresses ideas that are complicated and perverse. This isn’t enough to make “Upgraded” transcend its formula, but it does make it slightly better than it had to be.

The audience is made to wait a long time for an ending that's not worth waiting for.

The sentimentality overtakes Wonder Boys when, in the last half hour, it tries to make nice with its characters and fashion a deep message from a trivial story.

Would be a completely routine horror movie, except that it has a superior director. Watch this film for five minutes, and it's clear that Victor Salva knows how to make movies.

Goodwin radiates probity and makes waiting almost look interesting, and so, for all the movie's awkwardness, it remains watchable.

Despite some real virtues, Brian Banks as a whole, is only a break-even experience.

It’s a pretty good movie that automatically goes up one full notch because of a single great scene, which is one more than most movies have.

An exceptionally good movie in its first hour and an exceptionally bad one in its second.

French Exit is worth seeing because it gives a juicy role to Michelle Pfeiffer, who is something to marvel at. But it’s a frustrating film because, as a whole, it’s just not nearly as good as its central performance.

It's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie.

The idea of a worldwide calamity returning with a vengeance is an awful prospect that audiences, at this moment in particular, might find dreadful. So, it’s especially easy to sympathize with the characters in these early moments. Yet after the opening, A Quiet Place II doesn’t show us anything new, and soon the movie’s energy flags.

Too grotesque for children and just too silly for their parents.

An earnest film, a well-acted film and, despite the presence of a star director, a generous film. As a director, McGregor is good to his co-stars and highlights them throughout. But the energy drops out of the last third of the picture, and takes with it much of its aura of importance.

Whenever Roberts is onscreen, Closer freezes and starts to atrophy. And when she's off, tender shoots of life begin to sprout.

Jones has many good moments, and “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is a decent remake of a decent movie.

We end up with a movie in which it becomes very possible to respect the intent and yet be frustrated by the result.

The superhero part of the movie will leave audiences with a flat feeling, thanks to computery-looking special effects and a sagging story line.

Here Today is a weird case — not mediocre, not lukewarm, but genuinely bad and good, cringe-worthy and moving. Take this as a recommendation, and a warning.

A promising idea turns into nothing, and we're left with a painfully dull kids' picture.

Has the three elements we've come to expect from Eastwood: the steady pace, the shadowy cinematography and, of course, the presence of the Big Guy.

Hunnam makes a strong impression as a tough guy in the title role, but there’s something about either him or the filmmaking or the subject matter that allows viewers to resist making his problems our problems.

There are some nice things to be said about Hairspray, the John Waters movie which opened over the weekend, but not enough to explain all you've been hearing about it. It's a fairly run-of-the-mill teenage dance movie, set in Baltimore in the early '60s, with a certain oddball humor that only occasionally lifts it out of its class. [29 Feb 1988, p.F3]

Routine, genial sports movie.

Has its moments, and Schwarzenegger is as buff and tough as ever. But there's a flat feeling about this effort that's unmistakable and inescapable.

If there’s a weakness to the movie, it’s that, despite its gut-level appeal, it doesn’t dazzle us with anything brilliant or unexpected. However, there are some nifty turns here and there, so it’s not entirely mediocre.

Stone does everything he can to do justice to the real-life people he's depicting, and yet nothing he does can cover up the film's single but overarching weakness: The personal story he uses to portray the larger event is limited in scope and impact.

The directorial talent is there. Now if he can just be persuaded to let someone else write the script next time, we might have something serious to talk about.

It’s hard to know what Maiwenn was trying to accomplish here, besides giving herself a juicy and an entirely sympathetic historically-based role. She achieves that, and she’s good in the film — Maiwenn always is — but the “what’s the point of all this” question takes “Jeanne du Barry” down just a notch.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

The subtle ironies of Austen's novel are rendered obvious, and the book's social satire gives way here to more straightforward romantic comedy.

Certainly, the actors seem to be having a good time, even if the people they’re playing are utterly miserable. Hathaway’s comic timing has become a marvel in recent years, but Ejiofor, too, exults in the chance to throw off his usual gravity.

In the end, the film shakes down as a kind of eat-your-spinach exercise, a movie that’s worthy and perhaps good for you, but is labored and only enjoyable intermittently.